MOSCOW – The members of a two-man crew who will next month blast off to the International Space Station were undergoing their final exams in Moscow on Friday.

As part of Expedition 57/58, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian space agency Roscosmos Alexey Ovchinin will launch on board a Russian Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Oct. 11, before joining three others on board the spacial platform, according to NASA.

“During a planned six-month mission, station crew members will take part in about 250 research investigation and technology demonstrations not possible on Earth to advance scientific knowledge of Earth, space, physical and biological sciences,” NASA said.

The journey to the ISS will take six hours and upon docking, the pair will join NASA astronaut Serena Auñon-Chancellor, Expedition 57 Commander Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency and Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos, who docked at the module on June 8.

Hague and Ovchinin will return to Earth in April, while the other three already onboard to ISS are scheduled to return home in December.

The ISS was launched into orbit in 1998 and comprises more than a dozen modules used for storage, experiments and astronauts’ living quarters.

Enter your email address to subscribe to free headlines (and great cartoons so every email has a happy ending!) from the Latin American Herald Tribune: